Mrs. Carrie Payson eyed her sister witheringly. "Don't be childish, Charlotte." Out on the walk, her face toward the lake, her head lifted, her hands jammed into her sweater pockets, Lottie was off. A voice was calling her. "What?" "Your hat! You forgot your hat!" "I don't want it." She turned resolutely away from the maternal voice and the hat. Her mother's head was stuck out of the car door. Lottie heard, unheeding, a last faint "Sunburn!" and "Complexion." A half mile up, a half mile back. Walking gave her a sense of freedom, of exhilaration; helped her to face the rest of the day. In the evening they often drove round to Belle's; or about the park again on warm summer nights. But on this particular March afternoon the Reading Club once more claimed Lottie. One of the Readers had married. This was her long-planned afternoon at home for the girls. Her newly-furnished four-room apartment awaited their knowing inspection. Her wedding silver and linen shone and glittered for them. Celia Sprague was a bride at thirty-six, after a ten-years' engagement. "Now, Lottie," she had said, over the telephone, "you've just got to come. Every one of the girls will be here. It's my first party in my new home. Oh, I notice you find time for your new highbrow friends. It won't hurt you to come slumming this once. Well, but your mother can do without you for one afternoon can't she! Good heavens, you've _some_ right to your----" Lottie came. She came and brought her knitting as did every other member of the Reading Club. Satin camisoles, lingerie, hemstitching, and bead bags had been abandoned for hanks of wool. The Reading Club, together with the rest of North America, was swaddling all Belgium in a million pounds of gray and olive-drab sweaters, mufflers, socks, caps, mittens, helmets, stomach bands. Purl and knit, purl and knit, the Reading Club scarcely dropped a stitch as it exclaimed, and cooed and _ah'd_ and _oh'd_ over Celia Sprague Horner's ("Oh now, that's all right! Just call me Celia Sprague. Everybody does. I can't get used to it myself, after all the years I've been--Why just last week at Shield's, when I was giving my charge, I told the clerk--") new four-room apartment on Fifty-first Street--now more elegantly known as Hyde Park Boulevard. Curiously enough Celia, who had been rather a haggard and faded fiancée of thirty-six, was now, by some magic process, a well-preserved and attractive young matron of thirty-six. A certain new assurance in her bearing; a blithe self-confidence in her conversation; a look in her eyes. The beloved woman.